


I Alone Will Carry On

by autobotscoutriella



Category: Redwall Series - Brian Jacques
Genre: Angst, Five Stages of Grief, Gen, Minor Character Death, Non-Graphic Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, minor in the sense that they exist in canon but I made up every detail about them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 12:18:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19295599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autobotscoutriella/pseuds/autobotscoutriella
Summary: Grath Longfletch finds that the most painful part of recovering from the brutal attack on her family and home isn't physical.





	I Alone Will Carry On

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [FandomWeekly](https://fandomweekly.dreamwidth.org/231446.html) for the prompt "five stages of grief". 
> 
> The title comes from Grath's song in one of her early POV chapters:  
>  _Lutra's Holt has not yet gone_  
>  _By my bow I swear it so_  
>  _I alone will carry on_  
>  _Wreaking vengeance where I go_

When she first opened her eyes, eight days after that night, she refused to believe what she could see in front of her.

The cave above her head was made of dirt and a few rough stony patches. The polished curves of ancient tree roots interwoven with brightly colored ribbon braids that made up the roof of Holt Lutra were nowhere to be seen. She could hear the river outside if she concentrated hard on the slightest sound, but the rushing of the little waterfall that spilled down toward the estuary and never froze even in the dead of winter was gone. There was no chattering and laughter to fill the silence, as there would be if her family were there. There wasn't a single part of her body that didn't hurt, but no one was there to take her paw and tell her that she'd be fine, lucky her, and wasn't that a dumb stunt to pull?

They couldn't be gone. She _would not_ allow it. Her family must still be alive. No matter what she saw or thought she saw—they were not dead. Her mother. Her two tiny brothers, pups who were barely large enough to climb the little stream that formed the babies' playground. The cousins she wrestled and raced with, in and out of the water and down to the sea and back. _No, no, no. I won't let them be. They can't be. They can't be._  She drifted back into feverish unconsciousness with the desperate denial ringing through her mind.

Half the season was gone and Mossflower was buried deep under heavy snowdrifts when Grath finally woke enough to remember her name, and her family, and the details of the shadowy nightmare she had relived each night in dreams.

Searats. Dozens of them, swarming through the sleeping Holt with bloody weapons in their paws and gleeful battle cries in their mouths.

Lutra's Holt had not been warriors. They had been families, and little ones, and elders, and yes, a few strong young ones who could have put up a fight, but not when they were attacked without warning, for no reason, in their sleep—and even if they had been warned, none of them had swords or axes like those she remembered seeing raised against the moonlight in the door. Bows and slings would have been useless even if they could have reached them. They had been helpless against the tide of brutality.

It should have terrified her. It enraged her.

When she could finally close her paw into a proper fist without pain shooting up to her shoulder, she asked the two silent voles who brought her food each day for a good yew sapling and some straight shafts. The bow was made with the names and faces of Grath's murdered kin seared into her mind with each stroke of the flint shard she used to shape it. Each throb of her wounds, aggravated by the activity, spurred her on to remember, and to avenge.

By the time she had moved on to fletching the arrows, attaching each iridescent green feather to the shafts individually, she had allowed herself to think about what could have been. If she had gone down to the estuary that evening, would she have seen the ship? Would she have been able to warn her family, her kin? Move them all away from the sea before disaster struck?

Sitting outside the voles' den with her arrows stacked neatly beside her on one side and the supplies on the other, she could smell the ocean, hear the waves on the shore in the distance. She could have walked there now. She had begun to test her muscles in the flooded stream already, ignoring the icy water of early-spring floods in the interest of regaining her strength. But she could not go back. Not yet.

_If I could do it over again, I would—_

She would go down to the shore. She would watch for ships every night, see to it that she and her cousins took shifts at the water's edge guarding against any threat that might roll in with the tide. She would make sure that no harm ever came to them again, if she could only have her family back.

Early spring turned into full spring, with snow giving way to soft rain and grass and flowers breaking through the ground, but there were days where Grath did not step outside, even to fletch her arrows or test the arched yew bough that was nearly ready to be bent into a full bow. She spent her days curled up on her blankets near the fire, and turned away the food that the kind quiet vole and his wife brought her.

Flowers were a reminder of the triplet ottermaids, her youngest cousins, who would have been weaving crowns and decorating the Holt until the elders shooed them outside for getting petals all over the floor. Her brothers would have been old enough to wet their paws at the edges of the big river now, and Grath would have been watching their every move lest they go too deep. She could not celebrate the spring, its new life, her _own_  life, without them.

But those days passed, and when the last of the snow was gone from the ground and the days were long and pleasantly warm, the great bow was finished, every arrow was fletched and placed neatly into a simple bark-strap quiver, and Grath's scars only hurt if she deliberately stressed the old wounds. She could swim in the river again, and walk as far as she needed to, but she had yet to return to her old home.

Holt Lutra was gone. She could not leave it forever in the vain hope that someone would return.

It was time to go home. It was time to bury her dead, or what was left of them.

And then their murderers would pay for her grief tenfold.


End file.
